Richest self-made person (female)

The richest self-made woman – defined as having a Forbes self-made score of 9 or 10 – is Diane Hendricks (USA), co-founder and chairwoman of ABC Supply, a roofing materials distributor. As of 9 October 2024, Hendricks had a Forbes-estimated net worth of $21.9 bn (£16.5 bn).

Diane Smith was born in 1947, and grew up as one of nine children on a small dairy farm in Osseo, Wisconsin. She had her first child when she was 17, but did manage to graduate with a high school diploma. She divorced her first husband when she was in her early 20s, and set about trying to build a career for herself in real-estate while also looking after her child and working a waitressing job to pay bills.

In 1975 she met her second husband and future business partner Ken Hendricks, who was a roofing contractor. They took out a loan and established ABC Supply, initially selling roofing materials to contractors in northwest Wisconsin. The two ran the business together until Ken Hendricks' death in 2007. Since 2007, Hendricks has more than doubled the size of the company.

The Forbes self-made index sorts the extremely rich according to the degree to which they were responsible for their wealth. A person with a self-made score of 1 would be someone who inherited their wealth and has not worked to increase it. A person with a self-made score of 10 is someone who grew up in poverty and overcame significant obstacles while building their fortune. An example of a billionaire with a self-made score of 1 is Christy Walton, who inherited her $16.8-bn fortune from her late husband John Walton, who himself inherited it from his father, Walmart founder Sam Walton. On the opposite end of the scale is someone like Oprah Winfrey, who was born to a poor family in rural Mississippi and worked her way up through the entertainment business to build her own media empire.

The largest group within the Forbes 400 (a list of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States) are people with a self-made score of 8, who make up around 36 percent of the people on the list. A score of 8 means that a person generated their wealth through their own business ventures, but came from a prosperous upper-middle-class family. Their family's resources supported their early entrepreneurial ventures, either financially or through business connections. A typical example of a person in this category is Bill Gates, whose parents were a prominent corporate lawyer and a banking executive, whose connections in the business world were able to get Microsoft introductions to important clients.